The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand | Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at Rent the Runway)

1. Prioritize Focused Work

Challenge yourself to focus on the most important tasks and avoid overwork, as overwork often sidesteps the hard work of prioritization and can lead to burnout. Regularly audit your time and force yourself to log off at set times to increase productivity and maintain boundaries.

2. Cultivate Growth Through Challenge

Continuously challenge yourself and take calculated risks in your career and life, as this is essential for personal and professional growth. Embrace stepping out of your comfort zone to expand your capabilities and understanding.

3. Maintain Curiosity & Open-mindedness

Always remember there’s more you don’t know than you do, and stay open-minded and willing to be wrong. This approach fosters continuous learning, improves leadership, and contributes to overall happiness.

4. Understand Management as Service

Recognize that management is primarily a service job focused on helping your team and company succeed, rather than a position of absolute authority or control over your own time. Your role involves nudging, encouraging, and setting guardrails, not dictating every decision.

5. Avoid Full System Rewrites

Instead of undertaking complete system rewrites, plan thoughtful, staged evolutions of existing systems by uplifting specific components and cleaning up technical debt. Full rewrites often underestimate migration time and system complexity, leading to stalled feature development and unexpected problems.

6. Share Credit with Engineers

Actively share credit for project successes and be inclusive of the engineering team, giving them opportunities to speak about their contributions. This prevents engineers from feeling their hard work is unacknowledged and reduces resentment towards product managers.

7. Show Empathy for Technical Details

Demonstrate genuine empathy for the technical details engineers are working on, even if you don’t need to understand every single one. Avoid dismissing details or acting like they don’t matter, as this can be very off-putting and shows a lack of respect for their work.

8. Connect People Directly (Avoid ‘Telephone’)

When faced with technical questions you can’t answer, connect engineers directly with the relevant people (e.g., other engineers, stakeholders) instead of acting as a middle person. This prevents loss of information in translation, saves time, and reduces annoyance for all parties.

9. Involve Engineers in Ideation

Don’t hoard all product ideas; instead, involve engineers in the ideation and decision-making process. Suppressing their creativity can lead engineers to find outlets in over-engineering or unnecessary rewrites, which is detrimental to the product.

10. Master Technical Skills Before Management

If you are technical, aim to achieve a deep level of technical mastery (around 10 years of hands-on work) before transitioning into management. This builds internal confidence, maintains technical credibility, and fosters empathy for engineers, allowing you to guide effectively without dictating.

11. Limit Non-Direct Report One-on-Ones

Restrict one-on-one meetings primarily to your direct reports and your own manager, and avoid scheduling excessive one-on-ones with peers and numerous stakeholders. This approach is not scalable, often unproductive, and can be an ineffective way to manage broad stakeholder relationships.

12. Delegate More Effectively

Actively delegate tasks and responsibilities to your team members, even if it initially takes more time to teach them. Delegation empowers your team, provides growth opportunities, and frees up your own time to focus on higher-leverage activities, enabling greater scale.

13. Collaborate with Platform Teams

For customer-facing product teams, actively understand and collaborate with platform teams, especially if they lack dedicated product managers. Provide clear product feedback and articulate your needs to help them build more relevant and effective internal tools.

14. Structure Effective Platform Teams

When building a platform team, include a mix of software engineers, operations/SRE specialists, and product managers, and focus on delivering measurable, impact-based outcomes. This ensures the platform develops cohesive products that manage complexity and provide leverage to the business.

15. Recognize Signs for a Platform Team

Consider establishing a dedicated platform team when your organization reaches approximately 50 or more engineers and experiences significant inefficiencies from repeated problem-solving across teams, or encounters core scaling issues requiring specialized focus. Avoid creating one too early.

16. Thrive as a Platform Team Member

As an engineer or PM on a platform team, cultivate an interest in operational quality, scaling challenges, and the long-term evolution of systems, rather than solely focusing on ‘zero-to-one’ new feature development. Be prepared for longer project cycles and frequent migrations.

17. Utilize AI for Writing Refinement

Use AI tools like ChatGPT to rephrase or reframe sentences and short text blocks when you’re struggling with phrasing or flow. This can help improve readability and clarity, but always verify factual information provided by AI.